The number one game (I won’t say the name for the sake of spoiling) is also a great TV series. Like the board game cover, you might roll your eyes at first but as soon as you get into it there is no going back.

Interesting, putting Spartacus first. It’s a really good game, but with a few issues:

The movement rules encourage endless kiting, so much so that speed and reach overwhelm most of the other parts of the fighting. In a sense this doesn’t matter, because blind bidding means that players have a challenge of recognizing that things are skewed towards that way, but it also means that various mechanics that could be cool just don’t get the play they deserve. We’ve made a few fixes to this, like “your movement for the turn is the highest dice of your speed roll, and the person with the highest total can decide who goes first”, but although that pushes back speed’s dominance significantly, so as to bring in the other stats, it makes the arena feel too small, like it needs more hexes to work properly. There’s also issues with balance between factions, with battiatus being the underdog by the starting system, but without abilities that allow them to make that gap up, meaning that it’s basically a handicap decided by the first faction picks.

Anyway, still a very good game, but it seems like it is a few tweaks away from getting to it’s full potential.

You put Ascending Empire in the top10! Good call, this is possibly my favourite game, and also the first modern game i bought, after it was covered on this site. Its awesome, but sadly missing from most top 10 lists.

I got to play it a couple of years back, and absolutely loved it. Just recently I was thinking I really ought to buy a copy, but was told it was out of print :( I hope it comes back, somehow. I’m particularly envious of the people who’ve made their own single-piece playing surfaces.

I agree 100% with you, cosmic encounter is one of the best experience I’ve had when it comes to board games.
You just need to find the good players, it’s easy to ruin the fun (“Hey this guy always win, guys help me beat him”).

I couldn’t believe he’d skipped Cosmic Encounter and was about to post all about how silly he’d been when- Aha, there we go!

It’s brilliant. Hands down best boardgame I’ve played. My only problem, as you say, is that you need to find the good players. My friends are slowly coming around to the idea that constantly offering alliances is not the best strategy and doesn’t make for the best games, but it seems they’re mostly more inclined to co-op games like Eldritch Horror. That said, Battlestar Galactica is proving to be a nice bridge between co-op and adversarial games.

Incidentally, where were the honourable mentions for Eldritch/Arkham and BSG, Rab?

Just registered to say thanks for the journey, Rab! Your energy totally hits that sweet spot between jittery and insane :)

I’ve got alot of love for Spartacus too. The mechanics are pretty simplistic, and it’s not the most tactical game out there either – the scheme phase is a dogpile, the market phase is messy and tricky to put a value on, the gladiator fights can go from close to hopeless in one roll of the attack die.

But my god is it good at getting you all acting like you’re a scheming bunch of backstabbing, match-rigging senators in ancient Rome! It’s a game that gives you alot of ‘moments’.

The time my friend charged us all ‘gate tax’ in the deception phase so we wouldn’t have our houses broken into by his thieves. The 2v2 fights you can stage in the expansion, where one of your gladiators, crippled and immobile, sacrifices his last die and gets decapitated so that his teammate can clobber the enemy. The time we all balanced our ledgers purely through graverobbing. The time you enter your cook into the arena with back-alley betting and bet against yourself for the easy money. The time your defeated gladiator is so popular with the crowd that your friend literally can’t turn his thumb down to execute him like you know he’s dying to.

So when are you going to link all this stuff up to boardgamegeek dot com, it would definitely increase your site traffic? Plus there’s plenty of people there looking for more reviews and favorites lists.

The last time I played Spartacus, I ended up only bidding to run the arena. I had no gladiators, but won by forcing people to pay me influence to NOT choose them to fight against the guy with Stinky Pete, the greatest gladiator in the game with his amazing trident and then paying me NOT to execute them when they invariably lost.

Rab. Before I confess how much I’ve loved this top 50 list I just have to say…

Overwatch baby. You know it belongs in number 1. I know it pained you to slip it to number 2, and for good reason – It’s your favourite game of all time, its your one, its the one, Space Hulk is your one.
Sad to see it not in its rightful spot!

With that out of the way, I signed up just to say thank you. This was an incredibly entertaining experience. I really hope you continue to do board game videos in the future. I was a big fan of downtime town back in the day. Lets see some more!

I have always loved Arkham Horror despite it being… well sort of horrible on a lot of fronts. Watching games go from all but won to circling the drain in a turn or two or snatching a win from the jaws of defeat are great. It is a little (ha ha) skewed towards luck for sure, and while there is strategy to it, sometimes you are just going to lose, but it creates a lot of those great story moments when things go to shit.

Eldritch Horror as a newcommer, really seems to be hitting on all the good parts of Arkham, but in a much cleaner, more elegant way. You can explain it to a new player in a few minutes being the best improvement. The first expansion solved my biggest gripe with the game, that being some of the card pools being too small. I am really excited to see where the game goes, but most of the people I play Arkham with, already prefer Eldritch despite some initial doubts.

Been following this site for a while, and especially this column, but I just signed up. Hey everybody!

Great job, Rab :). And you too, Hope! I was wondering, when you do a breakdown of the top ten (or a week later perhaps) could you do a breakdown/summary of the games that you mentioned didn’t make the list because you hadn’t played them enough or whatever? I need more board games to put on my wishlist :D.

I hate this list. You know why I hate this list? Its because I had gotten off the board game buying train a few years back. I probably own about 300 board games (perhaps more) many of them I just don’t have time to play. This isn’t a problem on its own, however, now that I have seen the list, I only have eight games in his top 50. EIGHT WHOLE GAMES. I missed so many. I hate you so much!